14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of months ago Wolfram Alpha was launched with much fanfare. The new search engine tried to be different and for the most part it succeeded. But different doesn't necessarily mean better and, while it did bring some very interesting features to the table, it failed to get much traction and traffic numbers have died down recently. Still, the development team has been hard at work over the summer, adding an impressive number of changes and fixes.
“I just looked up what’s actually happened to the Wolfram|Alpha codebase since launch. And I have to say that I’m quite astonished: it’s grown by a staggering 52%—adding well over 2 million lines of Mathematica code,” Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the search engine, wrote. “There have also been nearly 50,000 manual groups of changes to our data repositories over the past 3 months.”
But it's more than just adding new code; the development team has also been working on making the best of the powerful features that it already had available. One area that has seen a lot of focus is on understanding what the users are asking. Because Wolfram Alpha uses natural language, semantic search users can simply “ask” the search engine a question instead of entering a few keywords. But computers can have a hard time understanding human language; in fact, half of the time Wolfram Alpha can't give a result because it doesn't understand what it is being asked to do and not because of the lack of data or a faulty algorithm.
Things are getting better though and the progress so far is actually quite impressive considering the scale of the problem. In the few months since it was launched the search engine has reduced the number of queries it doesn't understand by 10 percent and Wolfram is confident that it can go a lot further.
Despite the powerful technology the traffic numbers haven't been that great. This isn't too much of a problem as the engine was launched just as a way of getting real world usage results and is still pretty much in the early stages, hence the “Alpha” moniker. But even if the traffic numbers increase there are many who believe that scaling would be too expensive for the search engine to do it by itself. There is some good news though, as it now seems that Microsoft has reached an agreement with Wolfram to license some of its data.